Transcription
In terms of recovery, as we see it, I would say to generalize, there's two different trajectories. And this gets back to something we mentioned earlier about how some people progress in ways differently from others.
In the best of cases, a person looks like they've just moved beyond having a borderline disorder. The way we would talk about it clinically, perhaps slightly theoretically, is they've just integrated their sense of self. They have taken aspects of their psychological and emotional world that they use to project and experiences outside of themselves, very often angry or aggressive parts of themselves, that were always perceived as being the outside, reflect on them, see, "Okay, that's part of me." And our message to people is always, you know, it's better if something is in you to recognize it, because then you can learn, learn to master it. If you don't recognize it, instead of you being able to control it, it controls you.
So people integrate these fragmented and sometimes unacknowledged parts of themselves. They develop a much greater capacity than to modulate their emotions. When they're really angry about something that happened, they can remind themselves in a way that's partly an effort to be with them, then becomes more spontaneous. "Yeah, I'm really pissed that so-and-so was so late for dinner, kept me waiting, but then last week they did this favor for me." So like to bring the different parts of experience together. So it's woven into a context that includes negative and positive, and therefore, if not eliminates, significantly cuts, I would say eliminates the extreme reactions. One certainly has a right to emotion reactions, both negative and positive, but it just eliminates those extreme reactions that just wipe out any other feeling about the person in the moment.
You have an integrated sense of self and an integrated sense of others, and you learn to live with the complexity of yourself, of the world. And you learn to navigate life, going through the rough spots without giving up, and going through the happy spots, realizing there is no paradise. And therefore, you've got this more mixed and complex, realistic view of things. And with that, often people can go on in their lives and be, the way I put it is, as happy as a person has a right to be in the world. Since it's naive to think we can be totally happy, every life has its difficulties and its limitations and its regrets and so on.
The other, uh, oh, I would say this lady who I quoted as an example of that, cuz here she is catching herself in her, well, not only catching herself, but beginning, I'm interrupting myself, she's beginning to notice her projections, her reading into situations, her imposing things onto others that really come from her. And as she observes that and is cognizant of that, her integration into the world became much better. She was a woman who hardly had any friends because she was convinced everyone didn't like her because they might not return a phone call. Now, when you get right down to it, we've all had that experience, but if we all concluded a phone call that is not returned means the person hates you, then we none of us ever have any friends because we just isolate.
So she was able to integrate these momentary disappointments into a broader understanding of who the people, people in her life were, to not kind of eliminate or just be blind to the positive side of things. And therefore, she could experience others with both more understanding, more compassion for herself, and more compassion for them. And now she's having friends, and she's dating in a way that's much more satisfying than she was doing before. She's moving, uh, making moves in her career that look very promising. So that's one trajectory.
The other trajectory, I was saying to generalize, I might outline two possibilities. There are some people who, as I see it, never stop having that initial, very negative reaction. You know, there'll be the trigger event, there'll be a that quick, spontaneous, "Oh, they hate me," or "This is hopeless," or, you know, "I might as well just give up." But they catch themselves. It's almost something you can measure in time, the degree, the length of time a person requires before they catch themselves. And as treatment progresses, they can catch themselves almost instantaneously. You know, it just takes a, a very short time before the quick, familiar and old reaction and the correction and adjustment.
But at least in my observation, this particular group of patients don't, as the first group I mentioned, get beyond having that first kind of extreme and usually negative reaction. They can observe it more quickly, correct it well enough to move on more realistically and successfully with the situation. But I suspect there's something in their brain chemistry that is just prone to quick and extreme reactions. But the more evolved cortical parts of the brain have learned to see that when it happens, identify it as something they have to deal with, and then gain control and mastery over it.